Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion

by Heinrich Meier

Heinrich Meier's guiding insight in Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion is that philosophy must prove its right and its necessity in the face of the claim to truth and demand for obedience of its most powerful opponent, revealed religion. Philosophy must rationally justify and politically defend its free and unreserved questioning, and, in doing so, turns decisively to political philosophy.

In the first of three chapters, Meier determines four intertwined moments constituting the concept of political philosophy as an articulated and internally dynamic whole. The following two chapters develop the concept through the interpretation of two masterpieces of political philosophy that have occupied Meier's attention for more than thirty Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract . Meier provides a detailed investigation of Thoughts on Machiavelli, with an appendix containing Strauss's original manuscript headings for each of his paragraphs. Linking the problem of Socrates (the origin of political philosophy) with the problem of Machiavelli (the beginning of modern political philosophy), while placing between them the political and theological claims opposed to philosophy, Strauss's most complex and controversial book proves to be, as Meier shows, the most astonishing treatise on the challenge of revealed religion. The final chapter, which offers a new interpretation of the Social Contract, demonstrates that Rousseau's most famous work can be adequately understood only as a coherent political-philosophic response to theocracy in all its forms.

Genres: Philosophy

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Heinrich Meier is professor of philosophy at the universities of Munich and Chicago and heads the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation.

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book starts off promising but quickly degenerates into a meandering commentary on Machiavelli and Rousseau with no substantive explanatory pay-off as to how these thinkers responded to politico-theological problem posed by revealed religion. At best we learn that Machiavelli, representing one line of descent from Plato, safeguarded philosophy from the those who sought to subject it to the event of absolute's irruption into terrestrial history (i.e., the priestly caste), by forging an instrumentalist alliance with the 'prince' or ruler. In the process philosophy is indeed preserved, but at the cost of a certain "obfuscation" or forgetfulness of its original impulse.
Perhaps not one of Meier's most coherent works.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 2 out of 5]

someone mentioned that book shows that Machiavelli was one stream from Plato and by cementing

'philosophicals' with the leaders or kings

it saved them from being censored by the church

Though i think clarifying aruments is one main goal of philosophy

and its odd that philosophy and politicd are so connected in this odd work

I would say that all moral statements is where everything dealing with
- ethics and politics
exist

So basically they're the first troublesome statements where
we grasp at the difficulty of getting a good grasp on the meaning of so much writing or talk on ethics
and government, political thought etc

And nothing is really true unless we can verify those comments as 'true'

.......

Moral statements
and Metaphysics statements

which is usually 'kings' and 'priests'

are the utterances which are never too clear in their meaning
and never too clear if they are true

for they are usually opinions
not 'truths'

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

learning from the book how to raise questions.